This is an opinion column.

A lot of people seem nervous that Donald Trump might turn America into an oligarchy on overdrive, a fascist dictatorship or a cultlike theocracy. While I don’t consider those worries unfounded, I have a different concern — that he will do something stupid to wreck our economy.

That he will Make America (Broke) Again.

If he does, he could have help — mostly likely from the folks who have already helped him. Among the president’s fiercest supporters during his campaign was an army of crypto bros who consider the Biden administration’s rules and safeguards to be backward and overly burdensome.

Trump has already set free a cult hero in the crypto world — Silk Road founder and convicted drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, a.k.a. the Dread Pirate Roberts. He has named David Sacks his “crypto czar.” And he ordered his administration to study the creation of a “national digital asset stockpile” or crypto reserve. (And then, there’s the Trump coin, but we’ll get to that further down.)

Why does crypto — a technology prized by libertarian types for being untethered from government — suddenly need tethering to government?

Well, that’s the thing that scares the hell out of me.

Financial calamities are a seasonal thing, slamming into us every five or 10 years. A friend and colleague once told me the secret to winning a Pulitzer prize as a business reporter was to predict the next one before anyone else. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. Besides, many other crypto skeptics have already rung the bell, including Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and Omaha Oracle Warren Buffett.

Also, Taylor Swift.

The best rational argument for crypto is that it is a finite thing and therefore useful for storing wealth, like gold. Only, that’s not what anyone seems to be using it for, nor do many people seem to be using it as a legitimate form of currency. Its greatest utility seems to be one of two uses.

First, as Krugman recently argued in “Crypto is for Criming” is as a money laundering tool or a mechanism for illicit activity from illegal arms dealing to gambling. (See above: Ross Ulbricht.) Or as Dimon put it, it’s for “sex traffickers, money launderers and ransomware.”

Second, is more gambling.

The Greater Fool Theory is nothing new — the speculative game where someone buys an overvalued asset in the hopes they can sell it for a higher price to the greater fool. What is new is that you can now do this on a site, Pump.Fun, which makes Draft Kings and Fan Duel look like the S&P 500. There you can “invest” in such blue chips as “life-changing mistake” and another novel instrument called “Fart” which, when I searched for it again, I found only an endless well of other fart-themed meme coins.

The more high-minded crypto enthusiasts (snobs) will admit these such crypto markets are just silly gambling and they resent the johnny-meme-latelies for giving crypto a bad name — including, it now seems, the President and First Lady of the United States who, days before moving back into the White House, launched their own crypto coins, enriching themselves and, some speculate, creating a digital dumbwaiter of corruption. (See above: Crypto is for Criming.)

Fools and their trust funds will part early and often. That is nothing new. But what matters here is what happens next.

What we’re seeing is a high-stakes game of digital hot potato, where the second-to-last person holding the potato gets rich and the last goes broke. A lot of people have been playing this game for a while now, and they’re running out of players to pass the potato to.

Creating a federal crypto reserve passes that potato to the federal government — and to you, the taxpayer.

Those kids in the overgrown lot, playing with matches in the vacant house — that has happened many times before. Later, when the fire department shows up, they always have a choice to make — to save the dumb kids in the burning house or the innocent widow lady’s home next door.

When that happens, they rescue the dumb kids, and innocent people who had nothing to do with it wind up paying for their mistake — every single time.

Maybe I should invest in the meme coin “Old Fart,” but somebody ought to stop them.

Instead, Donald Trump has a box full of matches to hand them. And a full can of gas.